Carlos Catasse

Carlos Tapia Sepulveda, best known in the art world as Carlos Catasse, was born on October 25, 1944 in Santiago, Chile. Catasse has given to contemporary and avant-garde painting a special mark, a stamp, distinctiveness. He is a magician of color who captivates and thrills. His look is penetrating, stirring, and pierces space, sending a powerful message with form and color. While always in his own Latin American style, in his paintings you also observe a subtle homage to the great artists of long ago. Technique, craftsmanship, and a keen knowledge of landscape and its perspective, forms his inspiration.

Landscape is his scenario, and man is the main character. Catasse’s proficiency as a draftsman is an influential element in his work. Drawing is the structure of his painting. He follows an organic process, with his thoughts providing the story and creating the composition. His intensely colorful palette reveals a calculated cubist influence, allowing him to explore personal systems of forms and recreate them like an Impressionist mist, where most of the time color is more important than line.

In Catasse’s female portraits, women out of time and out of historical context look from their hidden faces as ghosts lost in the dusk and transfigured by the light, emanating a mysterious presence, made up of memories. Each figure is simplified and stylized, the non-existing looks that have lost their personality, have become universal.

Catasse has won many awards including the National Painting Prize of Ecuador. Museum collections containing his work include the Latin American Museum of Art in Havana, Cuba, the Larres Drawing Museum in Aragon, Spain, and the Contemporary Art Museum in Cuenca, Ecuador.